Credit Card Payments

It's been quiet on the blog for a while, but that does not reflect what we've been up to. Among other things, we've been working hard to get our credit card payments implemented so that we can start receiving payments from our customers. This blog post will give you all the information you need about how you use your credit card to purchase Bisnest.

Selecting the Right Platform

First of all, we needed to find a solid platform for handling credit card payments for us that would take care of the hard stuff for us. There are many services out there that allow you to almost instantly start receiving credit card payments, but we fell head over heels in love with Stripe. They have a very rock solid offering, and many large, global and well-known companies rely on Stripe, so we felt that we are in good hands. Their developer documentation is very good and their programming interfaces are dead simple.

However, one very important feature that Stripe offers is that we don't have to handle credit card numbers in any way. When you pay for Bisnest using your credit card, your credit card is never sent to Bisnest's servers, nor does Bisnest at any point even hold on to your credit card number, not even temporarily. This is all done using Stripe's integrated checkout form called Checkout. You can read more about it and even try it out on the Checkout documentation page.

From Trial to Paid Service

In a couple of days we will roll out these changes to our live site, so be prepared to see some changes. The first thing you will notice is the toast message on the front page.

While you are running in trial mode, this notification is shown on the front page of Bisnest. It shows you when your trial period expires, and provides you with a link to manage your users and permissions. This page is also where you pay for the service. At any time during the trial period, you can chose to go for the paid service and end your trial.

Please not that there are not restrictions to the service during the trial except that it expires one month after you sign up. You need to purchase the service before the trial period expires, or you will not have access to anything else than the page where you can purchase the service.

Managing Paid Subscriptions

All paid features in Bisnest have a monthly cost for each user the feature is available to. When you add users and select permissions and features for them, the cost counter will update to reflect your changes, as shown in the picture below.

When you save your changes and there is a difference between what you've selected and what you've paid for, you will get a notification asking you to update your purchased service. You need to complete the checkout process before your changes are available to users.

If you removed users and/or paid features, it is also important that you complete the checkout process, because then we'll decrease the amount of subscriptions, which saves you money.

Flexible Purchase Options

Stripe also takes care of charging your credit card on a monthly basis as long as you choose to use Bisnest. And if you don't need to do any changes to your users and the features that they use, you don't need to come back and reenter your credit card details. Stripe takes care of all the billing on a monthly basis.

If, in the middle of the month, you choose to change the number of users of features you purchase, Stripe will take care of calculating the difference, and apply that to the next invoice that is charged from your credit card. These changes are prorated with a daily precision, so if you a paid feature for only one week, then you pay roughly a fourth of the feature's monthly price.

These changes are rolling out to our live servers in the coming days, so keep your eyes open.